Quotes about emotion
page 7

Johnny Depp photo
T.S. Eliot photo
Leszek Kolakowski photo
C. V. Raman photo
Gottfried Helnwein photo
Hendrik Verwoerd photo
Laurette Taylor photo

“Acting is the physical representation of a mental picture and the projection of an emotional concept.”

Laurette Taylor (1884–1946) American stage and silent film actress

The Quality You Need Most, from Green Book Magazine (April 1914)

“By differentiation we mean the differences in cognitive and emotional orientation among managers in different units and the differences in formal structure among units.”

Paul R. Lawrence (1922–2011) American business theorist

Source: Organization and environment: Managing differentiation and integration, 1967, p. 11

Bode Miller photo
Wassily Kandinsky photo

“The disharmoniousness (one might say, the negative rhythm) of the individual forms was that which primarily drew me, attracted me, during the period to which this watercolor belongs. The so-called rhythmic always comes on its own because in general the person himself is rhythmically built. Thus at least on the surface, the rhythmic is innate in people. Children, 'primitive' peoples, and laymen draw rhythmically..
In that period my soul was especially enchanted by the not-fitting-together of drawn and painterly form. Line serves the plane in that the former bounds the latter. And it makes my heart race in those cases when the independent plane springs over the confining line: line and plane are not in tune! It was this that produced a strong inner emotion in me, the inner 'ah!”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

2 quotes from Kandinsky's letter to Hans Arp, November 1912; in Friedel, Wassily Kandinsky, p. 489; as cited in Negative Rhythm: Intersections Between Arp, Kandinsky, Münter, and Taeuber, Bibiana K. Obler (including transl. - Yale University Press, 2014
Kandinsky was trying to explain to Arp his state of mind when he made his sketch for 'Improvisation with Horses' https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Wassily_Kandinsky_Cossacks_or_Cosaques_1910%E2%80%931.jpg, 1911, a watercolor belonging to Arp. Kandinsky had told Arp that he could have one of his pictures included in the 'Moderne Bund' (second) exhibition in Zurich, 1912, and this was the one Arp selected
1910 - 1915

David Bohm photo
Paul Dini photo
Mary Midgley photo
James Soong photo
Philip K. Dick photo
Lord Dunsany photo

“When a society has doubts about its future, it tends to produce spokesmen whose main appeal is to the emotions, who argue from intuitions, and whose claim to be truth-bearers rests solely on intense personal feeling.”

Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980) English theatre critic and writer

Review of After the Fall, by Arthur Miller, at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre, New York; Blues for Mister Charlie, by James Baldwin at the ANTA Theatre, New York (1962), p. 143
Tynan Right and Left (1967)

H. G. Wells photo
Robert Musil photo
Eugène Delacroix photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Jane Roberts photo

“This conscious self is only one aspect of our greater reality, however; the part that springs into earthknowing. It can be called the "focus personality," because through it we perceive our three-dimensional life. It contains within it, however, traces of the unknown or "source self" out of which it constantly emerges. The source self is the fountainhead of our present physical being, but it exists outside of that frame of reference. We are earth versions of ourselves, beautifully turned into corporal experience. Our known consciousness is filtered through perceptive mechanisms that are a part of what they perceive. We are the instruments through which we know the earth. In other terms, we are particles of energy, flowing from the source self into physical materialization. Each source self forms many such particles or "Aspect selves" that impinge upon three-dimensional reality, striking our space-time continuum. Others are not physical at all, but have their existence in completely different systems of reality. Each Aspect self is connected to the other, however, through the common experience of the source self, and can come to some degree to draw on the knowledge, abilities, and perceptions of the other Aspects. Psychologically, these other Aspects appear within the known self as personality traits, characteristics, and talents that are uniquely ours. The individual is the particle or focus personality, formed by the intersection of the unknown self with space and time. We can follow any of our traits or emotions back to this source self, or at least to a recognition of its existence.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Adventures In Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology (1975), pp.118-119

Jennifer Beals photo
Alfred Horsley Hinton photo

“The prettiest or most interesting prospect may lack the conditions which awaken our emotions, and, lacking the essentials of the picture, must be passed by.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, How expression may be given to a picture, p. 33

Joseph Beuys photo
Tom DeLay photo

“Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour [the minimum wage in 1996] are hard to resist. Fortunately, such families do not exist.”

Tom DeLay (1947) American Republican politician

From the Congressional Record, H3706 [1996 April 23] http://frwebgate3.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate.cgi?WAISdocID=93746225856+0+0+0&WAISaction=retrieve.
1990s

Roger Fry photo

“There is no difference between landscapes and other subjects: in general in painting I try to express the emotions that the contemplation of the form produces in me.”

Roger Fry (1866–1934) English artist and art critic

Letters by Roger Fry (496 - 497) Chatto and Windus ISBN 9780701115999
Art Quotes

Saki photo

“Children are given us to discourage our better emotions.”

Saki (1870–1916) British writer

"Reginald on Besetting Sins"
Reginald (1904)

Laura Anne Gilman photo
Lauren Duca photo
Warren Farrell photo
Margaret Mead photo

“[In Bali] life is a rhythmic, patterned unreality of pleasant, significant movement, centered in one's own body to which all emotions long ago withdrew.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1940s, Balinese Character (1942), p. 48

William James photo

“It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

William McFee photo
Samuel Butler photo
Lloyd deMause photo

“But until my Journal of Psychoanalytical Anthropology began to be published and until my book The Emotional Life of Nations came out, few realized how much anthropologists distorted mothering in their tribes.”

Lloyd deMause (1931) American thinker

Source: The Origins of War in Child Abuse (2010), Ch. 1, JP, Vol. 34. No. 4, p. 299 (each chapter of deMause's book has been published first in his Journal of Psychohistory).

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn photo

“You cannot demonstrate an emotion or prove an aspiration.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Rousseau http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14052/14052-h/14052-h.htm (1876)

Lee Kuan Yew photo

“Once emotions are set in motion, and men pitted against men along these unspoken lines, you will have the kind of warfare that will split the nation from top to bottom and undo Malaysia. Everybody knows it. I don't have to say it. It is the unspoken word!”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew in the Parliament of Malaysia, 1965 http://www.jeffooi.com/archives/2005/11/i_went_into_act.php
1960s

Eduard Hanslick photo
Stanisław Lem photo
Orson Scott Card photo
Budd Hopkins photo
Colin Wilson photo
Damian Pettigrew photo
Leonard Nimoy photo
Ossip Zadkine photo

“The image of the city and the obliterated streets of Rotterdam haunted me. When I returned to Paris, I made a draft model for a statue in clay which attempted to express the combination of confusion and horror.... to stimulate emotion in the onlooker, to exude something which captivates the spectator, which opens up to them an unsuspected pathway in their own soul.”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

Quote of Zadkine from his 'Memoirs', 1967; as cited in 'Torso of the Destroyed City' http://www.zadkine.paris.fr/en/oeuvre/torso-destroyed-city, Musée Zadkine
Zadkine recounts the violence of the impressions which he felt then; the first draft for a monument to the 'Destroyed City', was broken in transport. A new version of a 'projected monument for a bombed city' was produced in 1947
1960 - 1968

Emil M. Cioran photo
Robert Silverberg photo

“I hate no one, sir. It seems a waste of emotional energy.”

Robert Silverberg (1935) American speculative fiction writer and editor

Source: Short fiction, The Emperor and the Maula (2007), p. 463

Alan Rusbridger photo
Angelique Rockas photo
James McNeill Whistler photo
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven photo
Albert Einstein photo
Roger Scruton photo

“[T]o teach virtue we must educate the emotions, and this means learning "what to feel" in the various circumstances that prompt them.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"Knowledge and Feeling" (p. 37)
Culture Counts (2007)

Marvin Minsky photo
Jorge Majfud photo
Johnny Cash photo
Anne Hathaway photo

“Her point of view about student work was that of a social worker teaching finger-painting to children or the insane.
I was impressed with how common such an attitude was at Benton: the faculty—insofar as they were real Benton faculty, and not just nomadic barbarians—reasoned with the students, “appreciated their point of view”, used Socratic methods on them, made allowances for them, kept looking into the oven to see if they were done; but there was one allowance they never under any circumstances made—that the students might be right about something, and they wrong. Education, to them, was a psychiatric process: the sign under which they conquered had embroidered at the bottom, in small letters, Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?—and half of them gave it its Babu paraphrase of Can you wait upon a lunatic? One expected them to refer to former students as psychonanalysts do: “Oh, she’s an old analysand of mine.” They felt that the mind was a delicate plant which, carefully nurtured, judiciously left alone, must inevitably adopt for itself even the slightest of their own beliefs.
One Benton student, a girl noted for her beadth of reading and absence of coöperation, described things in a queer, exaggerated, plausible way. According to her, a professor at an ordinary school tells you “what’s so”, you admit that it is on examination, and what you really believe or come to believe has “that obscurity which is the privilege of young things”. But at Benton, where education was as democratic as in “that book about America by that French writer—de, de—you know the one I mean”; she meant de Tocqueville; there at Benton they wanted you really to believe everything they did, especially if they hadn’t told you what it was. You gave them the facts, the opinions of authorities, what you hoped was their own opinion; but they replied, “That’s not the point. What do you yourself really believe?” If it wasn’t what your professors believed, you and they could go on searching for your real belief forever—unless you stumbled at last upon that primal scene which is, by definition, at the root of anything….
When she said primal scene there was so much youth and knowledge in her face, so much of our first joy in created things, that I could not think of Benton for thinking of life. I suppose she was right: it is as hard to satisfy our elders’ demands of Independence as of Dependence. Harder: how much more complicated and indefinite a rationalization the first usually is!—and in both cases, it is their demands that must be satisfied, not our own. The faculty of Benton had for their students great expectations, and the students shook, sometimes gave, beneath the weight of them. If the intellectual demands were not so great as they might have been, the emotional demands made up for it. Many a girl, about to deliver to one of her teachers a final report on a year’s not-quite-completed project, had wanted to cry out like a child, “Whip me, whip me, Mother, just don’t be Reasonable!””

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 3, pp. 81–83

P.G. Wodehouse photo
Dashiell Hammett photo

“Emotions are useless during business hours.”

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) American writer

"Zigzags of Treachery" (published in Black Mask, 1 March 1924)
Short Stories

William James photo
Luboš Motl photo

“Whether you like it or not, alcohol helps to create emotional links between humans, too.”

Luboš Motl (1973) Czech physicist and translator

http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/10/university-officials-vs-alcohol.html
The Reference Frame http://motls.blogspot.com/

Sarah Chang photo
Marsden Hartley photo
Sam Harris photo
Kendrick Farris photo
Sebastian Vettel photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo

“One can’t expect logic from males; they think with their testicles and act from their emotions.”

Source: The Number of the Beast (1980), Chapter XXXIX : Random Numbers, p. 385

Theodore Dalrymple photo

“The nearer emotional life approaches to hysteria, to continual outward show, the less genuine it becomes. Feeling becomes equated with vehemence of expression, so that insincerity becomes permanent.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

A Neglected Genius http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_oh_to_be.html (Winter 2004).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Pauline Kael photo
Benjamin Watson photo
David Cronenberg photo
André Maurois photo

“Human beings are lazy and it very often happens that one wearies of a new-born emotion for no valid reason unless there is some restraint to stimulate and stabilize it.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Friendship

Nayef Al-Rodhan photo

“The power of emotions as drivers of behaviour, especially when survival is perceived as being at stake, needs to be recognised and taken into account at all levels of society and governance.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Emotional amoral egoism (2008), p.203

Chinmayananda Saraswati photo
Henry James photo

“There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

"Anthony Trollope," Century Magazine (July 1883); reprinted in Partial Portraits (1888).

Charles Darwin photo
Charles Evans Hughes photo
Warren Farrell photo
Peter Greenaway photo
Felix Adler photo
Paul Simon photo

“Racial prejudice is thus a generalized set of stereotypes of a high degree of consistency which includes emotional responses to race names, a belief in typical characteristics associated with race names, and an evaluation of such traits.”

Daniel Katz (1903–1998) American psychologist

Daniel Katz and K.W. Braly (1935) "Racial prejudice and racial stereotypes". Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. p. 191-2 Cited in: Mark P. Zanna, James M. Olson (1994) The Psychology of Prejudice. p. 16

James Braid photo
Ann Coulter photo
Jane Roberts photo
Julia Gillard photo

“It's a big emotional thing to do, to challenge the leadership of your political party. There is nothing pleasant about it, there's nothing fun about it. It's quite a horrible gut-wrenching process.”

Julia Gillard (1961) Australian politician and lawyer, 27th Prime Minister of Australia

The Killing Season, Episode one: The Prime Minister and his Loyal Deputy (2006–09)

“True emotions and sincere words never perish. The great heart of humanity gladly receives and embalms every true utterance of the humblest of its offspring.”

Elias Lyman Magoon (1810–1886) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 554.

“Words as to the inner emotions do not come readily to me, for I have led an isolated life mentally and spiritually.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

Letter in a private collection quoted in Gillian Lindsay - The Story of the Lark Rise Writer 1990 ISBN 9781873855539
Literary Observations

Irving Kristol photo

“Nostalgia is one of the legitimate and certainly one of the most enduring of human emotions; but the politics of nostalgia is at best distracting, at worst pernicious.”

Irving Kristol (1920–2009) American columnist, journalist, and writer

New York Times Magazine, December 20, 1964.
1960s